By Simon Hsu
As with all things worth their share of time, recent responsibilities in the turbidity of life have prompted me to consider where my interests lie, a question that inevitably manifested itself in my own cinematic curiosities. These thoughts concerned the authenticity of cinema, on what filmmakers attempt to show, and what we as viewers are and aren’t interested in—heavy but critical questions asked last year by the closing season of The Wire. In fact, I’d credit that series’ meticulous depiction of a massive range of personnel and creator David Simon’s modus operandi of “stealing life” for sparking the theme of this piece: What movies have gotten my profession right?
I am a research scientist, a walk of life whose cinematic counterparts are relegated to a few stale options. We are either a) adequately described with a single adjective, b) contracted by the government or some other institution to explore the unknown, c) create monsters, or d) miniaturize our children and, in the sequel, ourselves. Science and scientists are frequently used as means to explore the fantastical, which is not a criticism but an observation that filmmakers are not interested in the scientists, only the plot points their escapades help reach (or incidentally the plot holes they help cover). Just a handful of films seem to be interested in the lives of people at all. I began to wonder why it is that few seem to be interested in what I value—cinematic form, an organized directorial sensibility and authentic texture, to list a couple—and if what I value in any way reflects what is indeed valuable. Years ago, Robert Altman referred to cinema as the great enabler that allowed us to live many lives. Today we go to the movies to escape.
But I digress. In compiling this list (unranked) I was not interested in the accuracy or validity of the scientific concepts presented, but rather the authenticity of the relationship between scientists and their work. This was admittedly challenging, and surprisingly so, considering cinema’s entirely capable reach. Naturally I don’t presume to speak for the entire community, but trust that the details of our work life and our inquisitive vigor cross fields of study.
1. Encounters at the End of the World (2007): Herzog’s stamina compliments our job, as well as anyone who does anything out of a love for their work. In the long run, the film’s subjects could have been a number of other people and still would have been fascinating. I’ve always held that one of the most difficult things a filmmaker can accomplish is to present the mundanity of life in an engaging manner, a precept Herzog achieves through his ever-introspective gaze. As any researcher working long hours gathering data on rather pitiful wages can tell you, the physical nature of our work doesn’t lend much excitement; it’s the hope of discovery, the intellectual reward that incites a cell biologist to scale the murky seafloor the fifty-fourth time, or a penguin scientist to observe the Antarctic birds day after feverish day (“I loathe the sun both on my celluloid and my skin,” Herzog confesses). McMurdo’s inhabitants are given space through interviews conducted in sustained first-person takes, intercut with shots of sea creatures and stunning landscape photography that serve as counterpoints to the reserved manner of the scientist subjects and the melancholic tedium of their work. It’s a rare film that juxtaposes the natures of artist and scientist, as Herzog depicts himself and his subjects as obsessed with deciphering the unquantifiable enigmas of the natural world. Refreshing and still incapable of actorly pretense, his subjects made me question the methodology used to elicit the candor and confidence they quite effortlessly display. An interview reveals that Herzog spent twenty of a thirty minute limit with a glacier scientist “[making] him feel calm and comfortable. Then [he] said: ‘I know that deep inside you are a poet. Tell me about the iceberg, and tell me about your dreams.’” Somewhere scientists are smiling and Mike Rowe should take notes.
2. Contact (1997): An animator friend of mine who would be hard pressed to pursue anything in the hard sciences always had a burning desire to be Ellie Arroway, and not simply due to his desire to zip through a wormhole in space, he confessed, but “damn, have you seen anyone this passionate about anything?” Contact, penned by astrophysicist Carl Sagan, is a bit of a double-edged sword—some of the directing here is so good that it’s jarring when Robert Zemeckis retreats to populist Hollywood impulses. Zemeckis has an uncanny ability to confer significance onto inanimate objects (see Wilson, Cast Away). In Contact, scientific equipment takes center stage: Satellite dishes, telescopes, computer monitors. Note how Young Ellie together with her radio forms the emotional centerpiece at the end of her father’s funeral. Another impressive sequence occurs a half-hour into the film, beginning with the camera creeping steadily up on Jodie Foster lounging atop her auto hood, satellite dishes in the distance. The dishes refocus in a separate shot and then back to Foster in a close-up, zooming in toward her closed eyes until an ominous, oscillatory beat picked up through her headphones makes her eyes widen. There’s something striking about how Zemeckis evokes the spirit of discovery and the pursuit for scientific truth, sustaining the pulsating noise throughout the next segment of this sequence, a strategy that creates an unease similar to what James Gray employed with windshield wipers in We Own the Night. Foster’s performance is remarkably controlled but never calculated to where it betrays the authenticity of the moment. Her steadiness has been effectively used to portray fright (The Silence of the Lambs), authority (Inside Man), and now awe. Though Dr. Arroway will remain a lesser known of Zemeckis’ fictional scientists, she still registers as the most bona fide.
3. Brainstorm (1983): By and large, sci-fi films display more interest in the fiction than the science. Hokum scientific concepts are free passes for screenwriters looking to explain any number of supernatural phenomenon and, of course, set up the accompanying adventure. While Brainstorm is not entirely innocent of this accusation, it does avoid more than a few clichés, beginning with a chain-smoking scientist played by Louise Fletcher. Film scientists are usually too clever, too educated about the carcinogenic chemicals that abound in cigarettes to indulge in the pleasures of tobacco. I was also particularly pleased with the film’s portrayal of a research group that functions as a team. The singularly “mad” or stalwart rogue scientist concocting experiments of his own does not exist, not even among the most experienced of us. The introductory scene best demonstrates the salience of a research team (of 3, a true-to-life figure), frequently framing all three scientists together within their working environment. The revelation that their sensory invention, “the hat,” is functional is shared, a note any research group with a successful publication, grant or breakthrough can substantiate.
4. Hulk (2003): Though triggered by personal calamities, it’s no accident that Bruce Banner’s first transformative episode occurs at his workplace. When that buzzword, passion, is stripped away, we arrive at the irrefutable fact that research requires patience, at times in ungodly amounts that few of us possess. A couple of months ago, a colleague shared the following: Late one night she overheard her PI, not as alone as he thought, furiously declare their NMR spectrometer a “fucking whore,” likely followed by wishes to wreak flask-shattering havoc. Hulk’s midnight fever dream is of secondary interest when compared to the details surrounding the laboratory setting that I found pleasing: The mundane hallways, the unassuming lab equipment, the bench where sample buffers were prepped for graduate students until we earned our own undergrad peons, the feeling of ordinariness. Concordantly, Banner’s lab accident is in many ways the anti-Dr. Manhattan transformation. There’s no editorialized music, no slow-motion; it's a matter-of-fact sequence lasting a distinctly brief 30-seconds. Ang Lee denies us sensationalized pleasure, and with good reason. Admittedly, I still can’t wrap my head around the film’s “dynamic” multi-paneled visual strategy. At best, the amorphous layering of image atop image comes off feeling like De Palma-lite, and at worst, it distracts from the film’s more compelling musings.
5. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004): The sense of realness and pathos in Wes Anderson’s film is remarkable, despite the fantasy of the world surrounding its characters: Underwater sea labs, headlight-equipped research dolphins, island-hopping gun battles, etc. This feeling of reality is aided by an undeniable Brechtian self-consciousness, opening with shots of a stage presenting “The Life Aquatic Part 1” to an audience in the film’s world, and closing with the twist that we the real-world viewers have been watching “Part 2” all along. Other examples of this reflexivity exist throughout the film, including jump cuts (boxed up sneakers, cut to sneakers in Bill Murray’s hand, cut to Murray doing toe touch exercises in his new kicks), on-camera documentary filming (Owen Wilson, demonstrating inferior boom mic handling skills), and lateral pans of cross sections of the Belafonte curiously similar to those that Godard/Gorin employ in Tout Va Bien, another highly Brechtian film. All of these strategies heighten the awareness of the protagonist scientist’s mission, exemplifying the primary driving force behind the time, blood and sweat spent on doing what it is we do: The search for truth. Despite the film’s surrealist elements, Zissou faces the same challenges a modern scientist does. Brainstorm, Contact, and Hulk are all conscious of sources of scientific funding, the threat of being shut down and the criticism of scientific peers. But I love that, in Anderson’s film, these predicaments build upon the pathos we derive from the character’s relationships with one another. Zissou is driven to beg his estranged wife for money, more readily demonstrates the acceptance of Ned as his son after learning of Ned’s inheritance and prompts Captain Hennessey to reveal his sexuality. At the end of the film, an initially humorous tumble down a staircase turns sorrowful as Zissou admits he is a “washed up old man with no friends, feeling sorry for himself.” Before his poignant confession, he says to his documenting cameraman “We’ll give them the reality this time.” How many films do?
A San Diego-based cineaste, Simon Hsu does research on protein structure at the UCSD School of Medicine. He is published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and looks forward to an upcoming publication in Biochemistry.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
5 for the Day: Scientists on Film
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
12 comments:
Hello fellow San Diegan! What about PRIMER? Does that not exemplify the exhilaration of the discovery combined with the horror of understanding?
Though not an engineer by training, I work with many engineers, and no film has captured their rhythms better than Shane Carruth's _Primer_. The slow, steady cadences, the voices that carry authority without being loud, the matter-of-factness of the two leads compared to the very slightest hint of flightiness in the two other engineers who are bought out of the firm (I think both smile at some point) -- It did not surprise me to learn Carruth was a former engineer. Roger Ebert (among others) noted in his review that there's a seductive aspect to the film, a sense the viewer has that if she/he listens just a little more carefully all will become clear. That seductiveness is a part of engineering-speak -- the notion that just about anything is possible -- and the film captures it beautifully.
Your reference to _The Wire_ also points out what may be the preferred medium for depicting the workaday aspects of scientific research: TV. I do not find _The Big Bang Theory_ funny at all, but someone behind the scenes is clearly advising them about the nature of scientists in graduate school (theorists vs. experimentalists, the disdain by doctoral students for the master's student, etc.). And in its early seasons _Medium_'s Joe Dubois represented a happily married scientist who just goes to work everyday, keeping business hours, working at a contracting firm, and trying to snag grants. Though the show is of little interest to me since its turn towards dark and disturbing stories, I still say he's the best dressed mathematician on TV. (Sorry, Krumholtz.)
Simon...I was surprised that The Andromeda Strain didn't make your list (the original film version, not last year's horrid TV remake).
What was your take on that one?
Thanks for the comments/suggestions, guys. As any scientist, nay, human being knows, time is our most precious resource. I initially brainstormed a list of films I should look into with the input of colleagues and the internet, then proceeded to weed out less attractive candidates. "Primer" was crossed off, ironically, after reading our own Keith Uhlich's review (as well as Slant Magazine's Nick Schager's). Despite my general disinterest in Michael Crichton's screen adaptations, I looked for "The Andromeda Strain" but was unable to get a copy (same goes for William Dieterle's "Dr. Echrlich's Magic Bullet"). So unfortunately, I can't offer a take on either =/
An obvious but no less apt recommendation would be Breaking Bad. I just rewatched the pilot and I find Bryan Cranston's character to be very true to life. His obsession with little details that distract him from immediately tackling what's staring him in the face, as when he asks the doctor that's diagnosing him with terminal lung cancer that he has a schmear of mustard on his collar, is not just something I've seen in scientist friends but also in myself.
I think that's something film geeks and scientists have in common, that tendency to get so stuck on something that it's impossible to move on until we've gotten it out of our systems. Different manias, I know, but similar symptoms.
Re: The Andomeda Strain
I think you may want to give this one another chance (Netflix has it - even an online playable version).
If you can get past a storyline about scientists studying a deadly alien microbe in a secret underground government lab equipped with a nuclear self-destruct device, The Andromeda Strain is actually one of most grounded of Crichton's "scientific" film adaptations including Westworld, Brainstrom and Jurassic Park (which is basically just Westworld with dinosaurs).
While not doing so too deeply, it does delve into the personal lives of the main characters as well their respective motivations. And I like that much of the drama unfolds as a result of a number of little mistakes and misunderstandings rather then more overblown causes. Also, it seemed to me that most (if not all) of the technology shown was feasible even in the 70's.
Thanks for the insider perspective. It seems inevitable that the more you know about something, the less accurate any artistic representation of it appears. One of my friends, a lawyer, greatly enjoys watching the first half of Law & Order episodes; but once the cops have done their job and the show shifts over to the courtroom his bullshit meter hits the red zone and he has to turn the show off. So, in all sincerity, please feel free to set this layman straight on where my choices (and I'll echo the praise for Primer and the original Andromeda Strain as well) cross the line from dramatic license to flat-out misrepresentation.
1. The Fly (1986): Not just for the geeky charms of Seth Brundle whispering his activation code to the computer or borrowing Einstein's fashion sense. It's how his thought process refuses to shut down, the way he constantly tries to interpret and contextualize his transformation even as it eats him up from the inside. The mind being the last thing to go as a disease makes waste of a body is usually played for tragedy; Cronenberg and Goldblum hit that note (how couldn't they) but admire the mental struggle as heroic nonetheless.
2. The Man in the White Suit: It's an old saw--and probably not a fair one--that the thrill of research and pursuit can blind scientists to the ramifications of practical applications of their discoveries. My favorite variation on this cautionary tale has Alec Guinness creating the perfect, indestructible fabric, only to find himself in the crosshairs of management and labor for potentially destroying their livelihood. That such a seemingly innocuous and helpful product creates such frenzy is a great joke (most apocalypses don't destroy the whole world--just your corner of it); a better one is Guinness's indefatigable aloofness to the whole matter, a critique of scientific blinders that can't help bending into a salute.
3. Day of the Dead: In a genre that tends toward either scathing indictments of scientists for their supposed inhuman detachment from moral consequence or starry-eyed lauding of their race for the cure, Romero cannily splits the difference. Richard Liberty's Dr. Logan walks among his chopped-up, spayed-out specimens with a chilling casualness, but his attachment to and fascination with Bub is sincere--and paid back threefold.
4. Kinsey: Marvelous at the sideways slides that scientific inquiry can take (from wasps to WASPs as Stephen Jay Gould put it), and the unintended consequences of placing yourself inside your own research. But Condon is particularly exhilarating when taking the exact opposite tack of most scientific cautionary tales, showing how investigation and understanding can be explosively liberating as they shatter preconceptions.
5. Contact: For one scene, really, when the priest is attempting to coax adolescent Ellie to an understanding of God's having set a purpose for all our suffering, and the young girl realizing she should have kept some of her father's medicine downstairs. That's as lovely and absolute a demonstration of rationality--the faith in ourselves to understand and overcome most problems that arrive our way, the bright human certainty I'd imagine drives every scientist--as I've ever seen in the movies.
Oh, sorry, at the risk of being greedy I just remembered another favorite: Rossellini's Blaise Pascal, for me the most engrossing of Criterion's recent releases from the director. Methodical and curious as its subject (Pascal's explanation of his proof of a vacuum doesn't flirt with tedium so much as deny that as a possible response to observing a mind in action), its admiration for Pascal's light of inquiry balanced by frank horror at the shadows of the surrounding world he failed to illuminate. I wouldn't want every film to be like this, not least because the experience wouldn't be so dizzyingly unique. Mario Nascimbene's riveting, Feldmanesque score was a marvelous surprise as well.
No "Colossus: the Forbin Project"?
No Zanussi? When I think of scientists, the first movies that come to mind are The Structure of Crystal or The Illumination.
For me there's no question Primer should be on this list. It's a massive oversight. Perhaps Che as well if you call being a revolutionary a job...
scratch that che remark - forgot the title of this post!
Post a Comment